Paradoxical Women: The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story, reviewed

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Paradoxical Women: The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story, reviewed

POSTED: Thursday, September 24, 2009, 8:30 PM

Filed Under: Arts Books

Pantheon, 320 pp., $24.95, Aug. 25

Blurring the lines between poetry and prose, Hanan Al-Shaykh's The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story draws us deeply into exotic mid-19th-century Lebanon. Al-Shaykh writes her mother Kamila's memoir, transcribing the story from Kamila's own voice. In the prologue and epilogue, Hanan writes as herself, describing how she has harbored resentment toward her mother throughout her life for leaving her as a child. Hesitant to feel sympathy for her mother, Hanan finally succumbs to Kamila's pleas and listens to her story. Growing up in poverty with her mother and brother, separated from her father, Kamila and her family move in desperation to Beirut in the 1930s. There, they live with their older siblings from their mother's first marriage. But when one of her sisters dies of rabies, Kamila's family forces her into a marriage with the stingy, pious widower Abu-Hussein. She is 14; he is more than twice her age. Though we see harsh situations throughout the novel, this one ' the sacrifice of the daughter by mother and relatives, the rape she suffers (she describes herself as 'slaughtered') ' is the hardest to accept. By now, we've started see Kamila's story as part of some other ancient world, a world of arranged marriages and male dominance; but surprising details readjust our notion of modernity. For instance, Kamila develops an obsession with the cinema, drawing much of her knowledge and life lessons from films she sees. Tied to her love affair with the cinema is her budding relationship with Muhammad, an educated man her own age who appeals to her sense of dramatic romance. During their 10-year affair she mostly remains the same girl she's always been: spirited, charming and vain, always thinking up mischievous schemes and tricks. Kamila makes her husband's life miserable until finally ' 10 years and two children later ' she divorces him and marries Muhammad, leaving her two daughters behind. The rest of the book deals with the span of her life from her marriage to Muhammad to the last stages of her life, when personal tragedies and war in Lebanon radically change her world. It's interesting how Kamila recognizes the injustices of her time as unacceptable, even though she herself is not exactly a 'modern' woman. Instead, she is a woman of paradoxes. She draws from well of deep thoughts and poetry to make sense of her everyday life; but she remains clueless for most things practical, such as reading and writing. She hates being manipulated and coerced, yet she manipulates others. She is cunning and bold, escaping trouble simply by making people laugh their way out of irritation; but she makes the silliest mistakes (thinking that salt is 'deadly poison' she can use to kill off her cruel brother-in-law). The hardest part of following Kamila's thoughts so closely is the immaturity and irrationality she displays through most of her life. Frustrated with her first husband, she tries to drench herself in kerosene and light herself on fire. She speaks strongly of not wanting to do a thing, and then goes ahead and does it. It's irritating, but since we're listening to Kamila tell her own story, we have to accept it. Eventually, she does change, though the novel seems to skip and leap somewhat abruptly through time later in her life. As for writing style, the book is strange mix of poetic language and flat, journalistic statement of fact. This dichotomy seems a bit confusing until we realize that we are hearing two voices: the daughter's (who happens to be a Lebanese journalist), and the mother's (who was clearly a wonderful oral storyteller). As for the descriptions Kamila coins and the metaphors she tosses about, they could be poetry in themselves. By the end, I found that the lively Kamila had succeeded in charming me over.

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